This paper analyses the impact of the modernization of the Swiss marital law in the 1980s on married women's labour force participation in Switzerland. The reform of the law comprised multiple measures to foster the equality between husband and wife within the marriage. The Swiss people voted on the reform in a referendum in 1985, accepting the new marital law. Hence at the time of the vote, it...
The seminar will share two connected papers, one newer, and in more need of feedback, than the other. The premise of both is the received wisdom that income rank matters for welfare, in particular life satisfaction. In most discussions, however, income comparisons are limited to the national population and evidence is correlational. In the first paper, we report on an experiment that randomized...
This study sheds light on the impact of different types of job retention programs such as short-time work (STW). We analyze the causal effect of an episode of STW on labor market outcomes up to five years later and compare this to the effects of sudden unemployment episodes. Using data from German Socio-Economic Panel (1992–2022), we employ an event-study approach to analyze the effect of...
I present first descriptive evidence on gender differences and stereotypes in newspaper coverage of company board members in Germany through quantitative text analysis. Regularized regression shows that family-related terms are predictive of an article being about a woman. An association of women with family and men with careers is also shown in dictionary-based analyses using the term frequency...
Using panel data from Understanding Society, this paper presents a methodology for conceptualising and measuring poor-quality employment in the UK as a distinct concept from job quality. This allows us to identify the most vulnerable employed workers in the UK. Key to this approach is the recognition that poor employment conditions exacerbate each other leading to more intense levels of...
The pursuit of science (especially exact sciences) is commonly associated with the male gender. This might have a lot of negative consequences, including discrimination and underrepresentation of female researchers at academia. We conduct two experiments with a series of conditions that make it gradually easier to avoid misattribution of gender of a female scholar. In a novel Found-in-Translation...
Work-limiting disabilities pose a significant risk to the earnings potential and welfare of older workers. While coverage of public disability insurance (DI) systems is almost universal, the risk of becoming dependent on DI varies across occupations. In this paper, I study the value of public DI across different occupations using data from administrative social security records in Germany. I...